Mercy (49 page)

She made a small circle with her curled forefinger and thumb and slowly pushed the egg into it, through it, watching the process as she did it again, more slowly, a prolonged emergence of the narrow end of the egg into the palm of her hand, the middle finger of the other hand pushing it, following it in. Palma cut her eyes at Mancera, who was watching Terry’s small hands manipulate the egg. When Palma looked at Bessa, she met the lithe Jamaican’s gaze, her eyes, large and long-lashed, fixed on Palma with an unrelieved seriousness.

“I don’t know that he had any overriding fetishes,” Terry said. “None that Louise told me about, anyway. Most of the time she knew when he was coming over, though she never knew exactly what would happen. He could be physically cruel, and later, after he got to know Dorothy better, he used a lot of what he learned about Louise from Dorothy to be psychologically cruel as well. You know, throwing up the incest business to her, using it to hurt her.”

“I thought Reynolds met Dorothy first,” Palma interrupted.

“No, Gil knew Dennis Ackley and some of his creepy buddies first. I don’t know how. But that’s how he got to know Louise, through them. Then he met Dorothy through Louise.”

Reynolds had really fed Palma a load of lies. The son of a bitch had been good at it, so good that she had shoved him to the back of her mind as a serious suspect. She remembered her father’s maxim: “A crime cannot always be reconciled with the subject.” That is, never believe that any person “could not have done that.” “A good liar,” he said, “will make you ignore the evidence.” Palma had been thinking like a rookie.

“I used to wonder why Louise told me those stories,” Terry said. “Sometimes they seemed so painful for her to relate, but she wanted to do it. You know, Louise had the lowest self-image of any human being I’ve ever known. She was punishing herself. I’m sure that’s what her maso-trips were all about, punishment, and then she was simply extending that by relating everything to me. I never got used to them, never understood how she could let him do those things to her.”

She held the egg in the cup of her hand and looked at it. Terry was no good at eye contact. She spent most of her time avoiding looking at Palma directly.

“It seems to me there were several basic recurring elements in her stories,” she continued. “Episodes that concluded with Louise being tied up by him; others where he ended up cutting her with knives or razor blades or broken glass; others that were essentially scatological.” She glanced at Palma to see if she had used a word Palma didn’t know. When Palma nodded, she went on. “She never knew from time to time what to expect, and sometimes he would mix them together, but always he’d leave her in the middle of it.”

She stopped and looked a little surprised.

“Maybe that was a ‘signature’ thing for him, something he always did, regardless of whatever else they did. He always stranded her, left her humiliated. He’d leave her tied, leave her bleeding, leave her covered in feces. He couldn’t seem to get enough of humiliating her and always walked out on her in that condition. I don’t remember her mentioning any particular object that he favored or any particular technique or scenario. I just recall that these elements recurred. She did remark that he was entirely unpredictable and quirky.”

“Of all these stories Louise related to you,” Palma said, “which ones stand out in your mind the most?”

Terry had to think only a moment.

“There was one thing he did on two, maybe three, different occasions,” she said. “There was a certain spot where he could park on the street outside her house and, if she pulled back the living room curtains in just the right place, it was possible for him to see the head of her bed through one of the living room windows. It was just a narrow little line of sight that would be invisible to the naked eye. But Reynolds had worked all this out. He would get outside the house at night in his car and call Louise on his mobile telephone. While he looked through the telescope sights of a rifle, he’d have Louise adjust the furniture and curtains to create the line of sight.

“When everything was worked out by making marks on the walls to indicate where the curtains should be pulled back, and by marking the place on the bed where Louise would have to sit for him to see her, he was ready. He’d go back into the house and tape Louise’s eyes with clear Scotch Tape, pulling them back, you know…” Terry reached up and demonstrated on her own eyes with her thin fingers, “…to make them appear Oriental. Then he’d go back out to the car and sit out there in the dark and watch her through the telescope of his rifle. She had to perform a seductive striptease in that narrow portion of her bed visible to him. When she was finally naked, she had to do certain things that he had instructed her to do, just sexually explicit acts with various objects, incidental things. The whole thing ended with her suddenly bursting a balloon filled with red dye against her forehead. Reynolds watched it all through the cross hairs of his rifle’s telescope. Then he’d drive away without even going back inside the house.”

When she stopped, the room was hushed. Mancera’s and Bessa’s eyes were riveted on the tiny blond, mesmerized by her solemn recounting of an unbelievably bizarre relationship. Louise Ackley’s cooperation with Reynolds’s sick requests revealed her to be the more aberrant of the two personalities. Her self-hate must have been extraordinary.

“I used to try to imagine what must have gone through her head during these encounters,” Terry said, as though she had read Palma’s mind. “She usually didn’t talk about them until late at night, after she’d been drinking quite a bit. They came out of her only at night, like ghosts. I guess she didn’t have as much trouble with them in the daytime.”

Terry seemed to think about Louise a moment, looking at her own hands, then she made a resigned gesture with her mouth and continued.

“There was one other crazy thing he did, maybe the most offbeat thing of all,” Terry said. “It had to do with Louise’s eyes.”

Palma’s stomach clinched. “Eyes?”

“Right,” she nodded. “Weird. One time he showed up at her house, unannounced, at about eleven o’clock at night. He’d brought a complete kit of theatrical paints, you know, face paints, and he made her sit with her eyes closed while he painted her eyelids. It took him a long time, she said, and he was painstakingly particular about what he was doing. When he was through, he sprayed her eyelids with a nontoxic fixative so the paint wouldn’t smear when she opened them.

“After they did their thing, he left immediately. When she finally got into the bathroom to clean up, she looked in the mirror and closed one eye to see what he had painted. He had painted another eye. One on each lid, the white, the iris identical in color to her irises, the pupil, all of it. She said they were uncannily accurate and realistic, and gave the effect of her eyes always being open.”

“Was that the only thing you can remember that involved the eyes?” Palma asked.

Terry nodded. “As far as I can remember.”

“Think about it.”

Terry looked at Palma, realizing that there was something about eyes that was significant to the investigation. “That’s…really all I can remember.”

“Do you remember if Louise said what they actually did on that particular occasion?”

Terry looked at the speckled egg. “I don’t know for sure. I think it was bondage. I think he tied her up and beat on her.” She was uneasy having to say it. She shook her head, thinking of it. “I think that was it; he just beat her up.”

She didn’t seem inclined to go on. Still avoiding Palma’s eyes, she returned the speckled bird egg to the coffee table and picked up yet another, a light turquoise one with rusty splotches. It was slightly larger than the others, and she closed her hand around it until only the blunt end of it showed through the same hole made by her curled index finger and thumb. She looked at the glimpse of turquoise crowning in the crook of her small fist.

“She couldn’t live with the incest thing, you know,” Terry said, studying the end of the egg. She looked at Palma. “You know about the incest thing?”

Palma nodded.

Terry let her eyes rest on Palma a moment and then they slid back to the egg in her hands.

“She said there were some days when she was able to blot it out, but never for long. Dennis was always there. He treated her like his mistress. I don’t know that she ever refused him. It was incredible. She was just a born victim.”

“No. There are no ‘born’ victims,” Bessa suddenly interrupted. She was scowling, and her Jamaican accent cut off her words precisely as she shook a long hand, her golden palm turned toward Terry.

“Listen, girl, that kind of thinking is what killed her. She was lying to herself. If there’s one thing we have all learned about it, it’s that the finger of blame has to point in the other direction, by God.”

Bessa impatiently pulled away from Mancera, stood, took a cigarette from the ivory box on the coffee table, and lighted it with the thin gold lighter lying beside the box. She sat back down on the sofa again, crossed her long legs, and glared at Palma. Mancera moved away from her, and she and Terry looked at each other as if they knew what was coming.

Bessa inhaled her cigarette several times without saying anything, and then jerked her lovely oval chin at Palma.

“Listen,” she said. “All of these women, your victims, all of them are victims of sexual child abuse. Dorothy. Sandra. Louise. And there’s Vickie, Mary, Gina, Virginia, Meg. All of those women into S&M were victims of sexual child abuse. Incest. That’s the real secret about these women. Incest.”

Bessa dragged on her cigarette angrily. “I don’t know what this madman knows about that, if he knows anything, but I tell you, it’s very strange how that woman—Kittrie—has ferreted them all out.”

She shook her head, her eyes flashing at Mancera.

“This was a big topic of discussion at the party last night, before you got there,” Mancera conceded to Palma. “Some of us think it’s a red thread in these killings, but there are a lot of women who simply don’t want the subject brought up at all.”

“Why?”

“Despite all the literature about incest that circulates in the lesbian community,” Mancera said, “the subject is still as much a taboo for us as it is for the rest of the population. Shame has never been in vogue.”

“In what way do you think it’s a red thread?”

“Only that it’s a common denominator. That and S&M.”

“Are you saying that you think there’s a relationship between the two?”

“No, not really, it’s just…”

“Yes!” Bessa interrupted, addressing Mancera. “There is a relationship, and nobody wants to talk about it because it’s not always flattering to women. Politics!” She turned to Palma. “The abuse of every sort that we’ve received from men has been so blatant for so long that we’ve become smug in our self-righteousness as victims. Especially the more militant women among us, the penis-is-Satan faction of the lesbian community. Damn them. These women have no sense of proportion.”

She addressed Mancera and Terry. “We don’t think like that, so why do we let those women bully us into this silence?” Then back to Palma. “The truth is lesbian battering is a growing problem in lesbian communities all over the nation. That’s right. Women battering women, one woman battering her lover in a lesbian relationship. It happens often enough for it to be a widely recognized problem that is so shameful to us that we have kept silent about it. It sticks in our throats to have to admit that in this way women can be just like men.”

Bessa leaned forward and mashed out her cigarette in an ashtray on the coffee table.

“I’ll tell you something,” she said, her voice regaining its impatience. “In our efforts to win some kind of equality with men we’ve weighted the scales too heavily. The truth is, we aren’t any worse than men, and we aren’t any better. Our sense of justice is no keener, our capacity for compassion no greater, our spiritual vision no holier; and we can be just as prejudicial as men, just as pitiless, just as wicked.”

She paused and let her eyes settle on Palma. “And just as violent.” She held up two long, golden fingers of one hand. “For two years I worked with the child-welfare services in Washington. I’ve seen what a hell childhood can be. True, in most cases of sexual child abuse men are the offenders. But that one fact is not the whole truth. I saw mothers, too, treat their children like animals, and I saw them sexually abuse them, torture them, and kill them. More often than I had believed possible. It changed my mind about the ‘sanctity’ of motherhood, of woman’s ‘innate’ desire and ability to comfort and nurture.”

Palma wasn’t sure where Bessa was taking her argument, but she was speaking deliberately now, almost as if she were instructing, and Palma was feeling the giddiness of the beginnings of a new idea. Her thoughts were flying back and forth from her long telephone conversation with Grant to his briefing that morning, from her conversation with Claire to her recent conversation with her mother, from the contents of the Ackley-Samenov-Ackley letters to Bernadine Mello’s death scene, from Grant’s remark that it was a very dangerous thing to be comfortable in your ideas to his idea that the killer is killing the woman he creates, not the woman he is killing, to her mother’s aphoristic observation on the humanity of woman. The pieces were coming together faster and faster like precedent sparks to an inevitable electrical contact, though she wasn’t sure why or to what end.

“Sexual child abuse is a special kind of horror,” Bessa concluded, her voice slowing, softening, the traces of her British accent clipping her words. “Do not overlook the capacity we all possess for cruelty, and do not underestimate how severely that cruelty can twist the soul of a child.”

There was a long moment when Bessa held Palma with her eyes, and Palma felt as if the Jamaican had, without knowing it, just released the last spark, and now it was up to Palma, by her own will and reasoning, to stretch that electrical pulse across the vast chemical distances to the formation of an idea.

But she could not immediately do that, and at the same time she was curiously puzzled by the tension she could feel from Mancera and Terry, who were at this moment out of her field of vision, but from whom she could sense an uneasiness as surely as if they had been touching her. At a loss as to how to direct her further questioning, but not wanting to let Bessa’s pregnant monologue die without amplification, Palma reached into her purse and pulled out the copies of the three colored photographs of Dorothy Samenov stretched out on the bed with the lurking, hooded figure aping at the camera. She handed them to Mancera immediately to her right.